Re: Install media 2012.07.15

Have to blow off some steam. I can't count the years I'm with Arch and how many pc /arm I've setup , recommended or otherwise loved Arch. But 2012 is by far the most fucked up year I've seen. Either Devs want to shut it down and get rid of the users before that or they don't give a shit imho. The current situation is a joke. Oh yeah glibc update anyone else need reinstall ( no i tried all suggestions) ? Pacman 4 keyring update making system unusable ... list is endless .. I've to setup 10 laptops for a hospital charity project and am not fucking touching this image for sure. Call me a noob I don't care ... Getting latest ubuntu install , hf !

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

ataraxia wrote:

zebulon wrote:

I have done a lot of work on the new Beginner's guide (Installation section): click hereI have salvaged the good things from the original guide and replaced the old AIF instructions with the new scripts usage ones. I hope this is fine with you (don;t want to monopolise the work!) and it would be great if people could test the installation procedure again.

That's a really impressive amount of work. It looks really good.

Thank you zebulon. I'm going to install this morning and I'll let you know how it goes.

(I have a working install already, but I want to try the new procedures)

(edit) following the guide on the news and zebulon's updated beginner's guide, I now have a new working install. It was not difficult. I personally found it easier and much less confusing than the AIF.

(edit2) I don't know if I am just lucky or what, but the glibc upgrade went completely without incident for me. I did not need to move or rename any libraries, it just worked.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

tuxfusion wrote:

Have to blow off some steam. I can't count the years I'm with Arch and how many pc /arm I've setup , recommended or otherwise loved Arch. But 2012 is by far the most fucked up year I've seen. Either Devs want to shut it down and get rid of the users before that or they don't give a shit imho. The current situation is a joke. Oh yeah glibc update anyone else need reinstall ( no i tried all suggestions) ? Pacman 4 keyring update making system unusable ... list is endless .. I've to setup 10 laptops for a hospital charity project and am not fucking touching this image for sure.

Are you suggesting that Arch devs did it all just to fsck your day / year up?

tuxfusion wrote:

Call me a noob I don't care ... Getting latest ubuntu install , hf !

Nobody is yelling GTFO at you, but you do need to follow the instructions, no matter what OS you use.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

Obviously noone cares in the development team what the minority want/like, but I'll throw my $.02 in also.

Another person who's not very impressed with the new netinstall images. I actually PREFER netinstall images (the old dual-arch one was my absolute favorite installation media since I could carry 1 usb drive and have an installer for any hardware I came across), but the going from a full installer to scripts just seems to be going in the totally wrong direction. For the longest time, I have used and loved Arch, but for the first time in a long time, I no longer even have an Arch installation USB, nor do I have an active Arch installation (1 broke totally with the glibc upgrades, the other is setting waiting for me to replace it and I haven't even attempted to do the glibc updates).

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

tlmiller wrote:

Obviously noone cares in the development team what the minority want/like

There has been similar posts in this thread regarding such as things as the "development team" or the "devs". What people forget is that *you* are the development team. Apple products are made by Apple, MS products by MS, Linux software is made by the community. It's not a matter of "caring", it's a matter of finding the spare time.

And, for the record, your statement is factually incorrect. The "devs" are the minority. If "they" were the majority, we would not be short of maintainers for the AIF script and this discussion would have never happened....

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

Woohoo! I managed to install Arch using the 2012.07.15 media. Installation seemed very simple although it will be a while before I can do it without any documentation. There is more commands to memorize. Installing grub2 required a lot more typing than I would have liked but I survived.

BTW I was unable to get the iso to boot under VMware Player although VirtualBox worked fine. Any ideas? This is on Windows.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

Hrm, beginners' guide (beginner's guide?) made it quite simple. A few things that weren't quite clear, but I was able to figure it out without too much trouble. As far as I can tell, wired ethernet should still be configured within rc.conf, I didn't see that specifically mentioned.

I have no idea what newcomers do. I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic here--it's just that I see developers in some of the "newcomer friendly" distributions assume that newcomers are completely moronic and wind up welding the training wheels to the frame, making it much more difficult to remove said training wheels and get the bike running well--that analogy, by the way, is more or less stolen from stevea on Fedora forums. So, I don't worry about them, or if I do, assume they are literate.

At any rate, seems very easy, especially if one has prepared partitions in advance--in this case, I took a test laptop, and used an existing Linux partition that had been used for something else. After that, ran the commands as specified in the beginner install guide, just installing base to start. I'm guessing the beginners' guide will get a bit of polish soon and all will be well.

EDIT--It was implied, I hope, but regardless, thanks VERY much to those working on the beginner guide, making it simple for the rest of us

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

I find the current installer to be wayyy better than the state of the installer over the past 6 months! The last releng images were sort of broken, most of it worked, but when it came to installing the bootloader it failed. I had to chroot and fix it manually multiple times. The official stable image was old enough to create problems, because of critical changes in the system (one page of news or something like that). Archboot worked fine all the time, so there was a semi-official fallback. This new image on the other hand works flawlessly, is quite well documented by now and requires little more than a step by step obeying of the wiki guide. The only missing thing is the automatic partitioner, but I never really used that thing to be honest.

Somebody will come up with a solution eventually. It'll either be something new or a fixed AIF. The posts by the devs on the mailing list and here on the board indicated, that it is not gone because the concept sucked, but because the current implementation was broken and the responsible dev stepped down.

I would not have expected the Arch crowd to be like that. Don't be like that.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

The Arch devs had two choices:

1) Do not release a new install media until AIF gets fixed2) Release a new install media without AIF

Given the old install media was quite broken, in that it did not work as far as package signing was concerned, updating from the core install was hard, bootloader install was broken, ... #1 was not a viable option.

Option #2 is clearly better. If people want the old menu based installer, they can either use the broken version in the previous installer, or they can provide patches for AIF to get fixed. When it is fixed, AIF will be included on the release ISOs again. Given we intend to automatically generate a new ISO each month, this could be included rather quickly...

Now, guess how many patches to get AIF working again we have received so far? 10? 5? 1? Nope... NOT A SINGLE PATCH. So I am not expecting it to be included any time soon.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

While I was quite fond of the AIF, it isn't needed. And I would assume anyone already on Arch would have at least the basic command line knowledge to be able to install without it. If not, then the famed Arch wiki is there with all the information you need. Follow it and you won't have any problems.

And I agree with Allan above, I'd rather have a newer installation media without AIF then have to use the broken 2011 installation media.

All around I say good job, glad to have some new installation media again. Although having an offline version would be nice in some rare occasions.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

Personnally, I am not too worried about the installer. This can be developed, and on the forum, some people have already said they have started to look at AIF code to reuse it as a wrapper for the installation scripts.

The thing that is of concern, in my opinion, is the fact the /etc/rc.conf file, which used to be the centralised configuration file for Arch, has been almost completely pruned. It is now only responsible for listing the Daemons to start at boot time. Now, the official configuration way is to edit many files, as I have described in the documentation. This is a big change in the philosophy, beyond the installer debate, since this affects the daily administration, and possibly the Archlinux uniqueness. Now the configuration is a lot more debian-style. I understand this is required for systemd, but this also leads to a lot of changes in the wiki documentation pages, and does not facilitate the work: since the "old" rc.conf is still supported, that means the documentation has to be maintained for both the new official way and the legacy way.

I do not challenge the technical aspect of that rc.conf revolution, there may be very good reasons (such as the transition to systemd) for that. However, I wonder if we still stick to the KISS principle with this very deep change. What do you think?

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

I had to make a new installation for a media server, so I got the chance to test it.

Overall I see no real issues, and the installation was pretty fast and clean. The scripts make things quite easy.

A few culprits or uncertainties:

- if I set locale to only sv_SE running mkinitcpio would spit out an error about not finding any useful locale; add for example en_US fixes that- I'm still a bit confused about what configuration files to edit, e g which ones the installation media requires, since the check-list (Installation Guide) omits several and there's a lot of talk about changes. This didn't affect whether the install was bootable or not, but post-configurations proved what I at least should fill in- Grub2 isn't very clear, even though it seems to be quite straight forward. The Wiki entry for Grub2 looks far more complex than needed for a new install. After chrooting I needed to run grub-install with the --recheck switch, otherwise something went wrong with the UUIDs (or I did something odd I don't know). Anyway this will probably be sorted out in updates of the Wiki. As I understand it practically only two steps are required after installation of grub2: "grub-install /dev/sdX" (possibly with the --recheck switch) and "grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg"- for me personally, while using GPT, I haven't got used to which utilities to use, but that has nothing to do with the installation media

In short: AIF could be extremely simple to use, but the "bare bone" scripts aren't particularly difficult, with some adjustments/cleaning up of the Wiki this method is just as good or better.

then I wrote down all the steps from the wiki on a piece of paper and followed it one by one. I've never partitioned my harddrive manually or used chroot before but it was very clear to me on what I had to do and why.So I don't miss the AIF and I don't think it'll keep new users away because once you've done it you realize that it's really not that big of a deal.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

I have tested the install scripts in a VM and it works quite well. The hardest part for beginners is probably partitioning the hard drives. The beginner's guide is pretty cluttered with a lot of notes and warnings. I think what beginners need is more of a strict path for this (with an option in the wiki to read the entire text), especially given potential data loss.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

The thing that is of concern, in my opinion, is the fact the /etc/rc.conf file, which used to be the centralised configuration file for Arch, has been almost completely pruned.

I am also a little concerned about this.

Wouldnt the right solution be to write a script that parses our rc.conf and if an option like hostname exists, just overwrites /etc/hostname with that. such script should be executed every boot before systemd (or if possible as a kind of systemd-module before everything).

This means we should make systemd compatible with rc.conf and not change ourselves to be compatible with systemd.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

Besides, such a 'solution' would be extremely fragile and likely to fail. Not to mention totally useless.... the changes aren't being made to be 'compatible with systemd' anyway, just to be as close to upstream as possible.

Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

Re: Install media 2012.07.15

ngoonee wrote:

Besides, such a 'solution' would be extremely fragile and likely to fail. Not to mention totally useless.... the changes aren't being made to be 'compatible with systemd' anyway, just to be as close to upstream as possible.

I see on the discussion ML that some devs have proposed to switch immediately to systemd, and drop rc.conf entirely (I guess we could put the Daemons array in another config file, such as /etc/daemons.conf or something). That would be a good thing indeed, especially for us who maintain the documentation! Although the rc.conf is still compatible, the new config file system used by systemd is now the official way, and to facilitate the documentation updates it would be great to clarify the "Arch way".

I have made a personal commitment not to reply in topics that start with a lowercase letter. Proper grammar and punctuation is a sign of respect, and if you do not show any, you will NOT receive any help (at least not from me).